Who is the enemy of humanity that teaches students to consult critical sources before reading the work of literature they will be analyzing? They all do it. Every single one of them. What is the basis for selecting critical sources if they have no idea what the work of literature is even about remains a mystery.
One student explained the thinking behind the selection as follows,”I just choose the sources that will arrive here faster” (meaning through the Interlibrary Loan).
Our ILL services work extremely fast, mind you, so this is a difference of 2 or 3 days.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is interesting. I have the opposite issue. Students want to read the main text but sometimes have a hard time understanding why they should read critical work as they write their papers. “I want to talk about my own opinion!” is what I hear. Maybe it’s because these texts are in a non native language and they hope that reading the criticsm first will help them understand what’s happening?
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This is the first time many of them have to use sources, and I think they are very intimidated by the concept of critical sources.
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I was the victim of a certain reprimand for not finding out what respectable authorities said about the subject of my thesis and agreeing with them, as my first step. Too much independence there.
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Yes, I have that experience, too. 😦
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But actually, the woman who knew Marechera fairly well, in person, also had a lot of Western prejudices and presuppositions. For instance, not understanding that the nature of violence in growing up is traumatic — complex PTSD (Judith Herman) is a better diagnosis for Marechera’s sometime madness than “schizophrenia”.
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“Schizophrenia” is a word that means everything and nothing. And I believe it is grievously overused.
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It’s also stigmatizing. My view is that if you lived in a society where there was a lot of pressure on you to excel academically, to adopt a certain identity and to endure a war, you might end up going a bit nuts. Not to mention the violence in Marechera’s life — of course he would have hit his teenage years just as the civil war gained steam. He was born in 56 and it was raging by about 1970, reaching its intensity in 76.
Somebody who applies the Western standards of a sedate European life to someone who did not experience those things might well come up with a diagnosis of the problem that suggests the mental anguish appeared from nowhere, except perhaps from the author’s biology.
But of course there was a context to it all — one easily overlooked by those who haven’t experienced the way societal changes can impact on their own psyches.
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I know what you mean. Among people from the FSU who witnessed the bandit wars in the 1990s, about 25% suffer from PTSD and require the services of a psychiatrist. Not a psychoanalyst or a psychotherapist, but of an actual psychiatrist. People who weren’t there simply don’t understand.
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In the case of Marechera, he was one of many children (eight?) born into dire poverty. His mother turned to prostitution to feed the children after his father, a truck driver, was killed at an intersection. I think it was a Rhodesian army official that rammed into him. Then there was a huge amount of pressure to perform academically to get “out of the ghetto”. At the same time, his mother opposed his using English, as that was the language of the oppressor. And the war in the bush was raging.
So, of course, what you need in a situation like that is a stigmatizing psychiatric diagnosis. No.
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Judith Lewis Herman of course has a much better understanding of the environmental and social nature of mental illness. Her idea is that many people who have been traumatized by their communities suffer from what she calls “Complex PTSD”. This can have many of the elements of other diagnoses, but is brought about by extreme stress.
Her analysis is also strongly feminist.
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I always did it. Especially on the quarter system you have to. Especially if you have a lot of people using the library. Books have to be recalled and articles ordered from ILL. Some universities also have books in storage facilities, that have to be ordered ahead and come in on the little truck. If you have the paper due at midterm you must start lining up your sources in the first week or you will not have a good set.
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Our ILL services are really stellar.
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